as you get older, you start realizing that you are not always right and there’s a lot of things you could have handled better and many situations where you could have been kinder and all you can really do is forgive yourself and let your mistakes make you a better person.
They’re more deserving of the uniform than most generals.
Heroes
Society couldn’t function without them.
Society really couldn’t function without them. Anthropologist Robin Nagel did this fabulous ethnography of NYC sanitation workers called Picking Up where she actually became a sanitation worker herself. In NYC alone, there’s fewer than 10,000 sanitation workers dealing with a daily load of about 11,000 tons of garbage and 2,000 tons of recycling. It’s a more dangerous profession than firefighting or police work (cops and fire aren’t even in the top ten most dangerous jobs in the US), and if the sanitation workers aren’t able to do their jobs, cities become unlivable overnight.
(Also you should read that Robin Nagel book, it’s really fascinating. Even if you don’t live in a city, it’s a great read.)
noone worth knowing has ever said ‘this is my friend, I love them with my whole chest because they never ask for anything and are entirely self reliant and never confide in me.’
Ever since starting to publish romance novels I’ve been checking out the romance books at the thrift store specifically for the clinch covers, as a reference for what I might want to do with my own books.
As a culture we mocked these to extinction but I think we were just afraid of their power. The modern clinch revival still hasn’t reached the heady heights of what they were doing in the 80s! The vintage covers can be really quite explicit. These ones in particular were steamy enough they had to be hidden on an inner flap.
This episode of the Smart Bitches Trashy Books podcast where they interview Shirley Green and Sharon Spiak, who were romance novel cover artists in the 80s, is a fascinating look at what a huge industry these covers were. Did you know they had whole photography studios full of props to make these? They’d take photos and turn those over to a painter who’d make something like a couple of these a day. They had it down to a science.
Here is a particular favourite of mine, also by Sharon Spiak!
it is crazy to me to see people acting like francois arnaud is some creepy ugly old man trying to ride his co-stars’ coattails like. girl that’s francois arnaud
honestly I hate “can you pet the dog?!?” not for any of the common reasons but because it was initially interesting as a proposition of “can you interact with the world in a way that is not within the primary mechanical loop” and that very quickly fell away to being “well now any indie developer making a game has to have a pet the dog button or they’re going to get letters”
One of my dream projects has an NPC with a dog, and if you try to pet it, the owner tells you not to do that. If you try again, it bites you and you take damage. I want to do this entirely because I genuinely believe that this would make me feel way more grounded in the world than any “click button to see cute animation” would ever do, and also it would be really funny to have a game where people lose their runs because they tried to pet a dog they were told not to pet
